People have been asking my opinion of the new Amazon Fire Phone, but I’ve had a lot of trouble answering. My first reaction was overwhelmingly blah. I’ll be curious to try it, and maybe then I’ll feel better about it. But right now it seems to me like a bag of interesting features rather than a coherent product. (Quick, what do faux 3D imaging and a year of free mail order shipping have in common? Absolutely nothing.) Plus it’s available from only one mobile operator, and the pricing isn’t low enough to get anyone excited. I’m delighted anytime a major company tries to innovate, but I can’t imagine this phone having a huge impact on the market.

So why did Amazon build this product? Ben Thompson made a good case that the phone is designed to strengthen Amazon’s relationship with its lucrative Prime customers (link). I’m sure that’s part of the motivation. But if that’s the only goal, wouldn’t you price the phone very low to grab more customers, the way you did Kindle? And as Ben himself noted, there are many other things you could do to more directly recruit Prime customers. For example, many of the Fire Phone apps could have been released separately for Android and iOS. Wouldn’t that be a better way to serve Prime customers? Rather than trying to rip people away from their iPhones and Galaxies, why not just co-opt them through some apps that run on their current phones? What Amazon’s doing is like selling your own line of sofas as a way to distribute slipcovers.

And so I go back to wondering why Amazon did it. Imagine you’re Jeff Bezos. You have a fairly stable relationship with Apple and many other phone companies at the moment; why turn yourself into their blood enemy for a product that that won’t move the needle in sales?

To me, the Fire Phone reeks of experiment. I think Amazon’s testing something, and the experiment is important enough to spend a ton of money and create a lot of competitive hostility. After thinking about it a lot and trying to look at the world through Amazon’s eyes, I think I can guess why the Fire Phone would be strategically important to Amazon. I believe it’s not about the phone market; it’s about the evolution of mobile commerce and the future of Amazon itself.

To explain why, I have to give a bit of background on mobile commerce. For online retailers, the single most frustrating thing about mobile technology, especially smartphones, is that it people using it don’t buy a lot of stuff. They’ll browse in your web store and use your shopping app, but when it comes time to buy they often don’t purchase. The industry rule of thumb is that a good commerce site on a personal computer will convert about 3% of shoppers to buyers (in other words, for every 100 online shoppers you make three sales). The conversion rate for smartphones is a third of that, about 1%.

In an industry that would kill to improve conversion by a tenth of a point, that drop from 3% to 1% is horrifying. Many commerce companies have spent years trying to fix it, and through incredible effort and careful experimentation it is indeed possible to increase the mobile conversion rate. In my day job at UserTesting that’s one of the things I help companies do. But it’s a slow process of incremental fixes, and in the meantime mobile web use is growing explosively. Here’s the nightmare scenario for an online retailer:

—What if the next generation of internet users moves to smartphones and wearables faster than we can figure out how to fix mobile shopping?

—What if, as people move to mobile, the conversion rate for our whole business drops from 3% to 1%?

—And most disturbing for a category leader like Amazon, what if the low conversion rate on mobile is a sign that the online store itself is not a good fit for smartphones? What if some new mobile technology or app makes online shopping obsolete, just as online stores have been making traditional retail stores obsolete? What if Amazon itself is the next big tech dinosaur?

Don’t laugh. Platform transitions in tech usually make the old category leaders obsolete. Read about Lotus Development or Digital Equipment Corporation if you don’t believe it.

That existential threat is the kind of thing I’d expect Jeff Bezos to worry about. It’s a huge change that comes from an unexpected direction and could cut the heart out of his business. What’s worse, by the time the threat becomes obvious it’ll probably be too late to respond to it.

So the time to act is now. Amazon needs to dive into mobile and figure out what the shopping experience would look like if you built it into a phone from the ground up.

If that’s Amazon’s motivation, then the Fire Phone is really all about Firefly, Amazon’s instant-buying technology. I think the question being tested is whether you can completely replace a web store with a properly configured phone. What if, instead of going to an online store to buy something, your phone itself became the store? What if, instead of searching for the thing you want to buy, you could just take a picture of it, or scan its barcode, or say its name?

Amazon everywhere. Futurist Paul Saffo put it this way: “Firefly allows Amazon to invade every store in every mall on the planet and turn it into a de facto showroom for Amazon” (link). I’d go even further. I’d say Firefly is an effort to turn the entire world into an Amazon store.

If Amazon makes that phone first, it takes another big chunk out of Walmart and Target and eBay and every other retailer out there, physical or virtual. If someone else makes it first, Amazon itself is in mortal danger.

I think that’s why Amazon had to make a phone. It needs to test and tune the integration of mobile hardware and software in the purchasing process, and that would not be possible on someone else’s phone. It also doesn’t want to share the data it’ll collect with any other phone vendor (especially not one allied with Google), since that could be the key to the future of the whole company.

From this perspective, the rest of the Fire Phone announcement makes more sense. You need to toss in a few sexy features, like the semi-3D screen, to attract some users. The price doesn’t have to be low because Amazon doesn’t want to sell a gazillion phones. One carrier in one country is enough because Amazon’s not pushing for world domination yet. It needs just enough users to give it a robust experimental base. Then it’ll observe, and it’ll learn, and it’ll tweak the experiment, and it’ll learn some more.

And then, when it gets the formula right, we’ll see the real Amazon phone. I’d expect it to be more aggressively priced and much more broadly available. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Amazon also release Firefly apps for other phones at the same time. By that point Amazon’s priority won’t be secrecy, it’ll be rapid domination.

Or maybe the experiment will fail. Maybe Amazon will learn that there is no magic way to turn a smartphone into a store. In that case it’ll quietly make the phone disappear, write off the losses, and move on to other priorities. Hey, it’s just money, and we all know how Jeff Bezos feels about that.

What it means for the rest of us

Do you remember back when Google was just getting started in smartphones, and there was widespread speculation that Google would give away a phone with free wireless service? The idea was that the things Google would learn from the user were worth more than the cost of a phone service plan. That idea faded away as Google focused on co-opting rather than destroying the mobile industry, and as it realized that it couldn’t make enough money from phone users to pay for the service.

It might be time to revisit that scenario. If anyone can figure out how to make a free phone pay for itself, it would probably be Amazon. Even if it can’t give away a phone for free, it might be able to offer steep discounts, putting the rest of the phone industry at a huge disadvantage. If you’re Google or Apple, you don’t have the sort of retail back end that Amazon does, so you can’t directly match that strategy (although Google might try). A better option is to team up with the other companies threatened by Firefly. Perhaps you create a Firefly-equivalent app and open it to connectivity with anyone else’s online store in exchange for some sort of revenue sharing.

That approach requires heavy skills in alliance building. Apple might be able to pull it off, but they tend to work exclusively with a small number of subservient partners. Google could try for a broad alliance -- it likes to do everything big -- but I doubt it has the focus and consistency to create a lasting partnership of equals with large numbers of companies. (In that vein, it’s meaningful that Google started on a path similar to Firefly back in 2010 with Google Goggles, but killed the product a few weeks before the Fire Phone announcement because it was “a fun feature, but also a feature of no clear use to too many people” link).

So Amazon’s potential strategy plays to the weaknesses of its biggest competitors.

I wonder if Apple might be willing to build a long-term partnership with Amazon, instead of competing against it. In addition to cooperating on mobile commerce, Amazon could help Apple with its portfolio of online services, a constant weakness of the company. Steve Jobs would not have done it; I think Tim Cook might.

If you’re an e-commerce company, you should investigate the Firefly APIs. It looks like you can plug into the Firefly system to make your own offers when a user scans an object. You’ll still need to convince users to install your plugin, but at least this will give you options. Besides, you need to learn how this new shopping paradigm works.

If you’re a bricks-and-mortar retailer, I think you shouldn’t waste time worrying about people using your store as a showroom for Amazon. You can’t stop that anyway. Instead, look at how you can enhance the shopping experience by embracing smartphones. To give one example, what if every product in your store had a QR code that took a smartphone user to your page for that product, with additional information, FAQs, and special offers? I’d love to have that in one of the box box retail stores where you can never find a sales rep. You’d enhance the shopping experience and maybe intercept shoppers before they turn to Amazon. Plus you’d get data on what people actually do inside your store.

I’m kind of surprised that Apple and Google haven’t already built a QR scanning app into their mobile platforms. It’d be a logical way to partner with retailers and get leverage against Amazon.

If you’re another mobile phone vendor, such as Samsung, you should talk with Amazon about integrating Firefly into your phones in exchange for a cut of the revenue. Better to embrace the company now than to risk competing against a heavily-subsidized Amazon phone in the future.

And for anybody who deals with mobile, the Fire Phone is a reminder that we’re just getting started. Although we talk of smartphones as a maturing market, we’re barely beginning to learn how mobile devices will change our lives. We stand in the foothills of the Himalayas. The biggest mobile opportunities, and the biggest disruptions to today’s businesses, are still ahead of us.

Microsoft’s heavily-rumored mini-tablet (link) was a no-show at the Surface event this week. If this had been an Apple announcement, I’d just say the Internet got carried away with itself. But the source of the rumors was the very reliable Mary Jo Foley at ZDNet (link), who’s almost a house organ for Microsoft official leaks. So what happened?

It’s possible that Microsoft leaked the rumors deliberately in order to smoke out Foley’s sources, but I don’t think Microsoft would have put Qualcomm in the story if that were the case. Most likely the product was real, and the announcement was canceled just recently.

Bloomberg says Microsoft execs Stephen Elop and Satya Nadella lost confidence in the product and decided to pull it at the last minute (link). That would be a typical move for a new management team – you always look to kill a few of your predecessor’s projects to put your own stamp on the organization. The reasoning that Bloomberg gave didn’t make sense, though. The report says the mini-tablet was canceled because it didn’t have enough differentiation. A tablet optimized for note-taking and equipped with a stylus would have been heavily differentiated, so that doesn’t wash.

More believable would be if the company is leery of launching any new product that depends on Windows RT, the ARM-based version of Windows that can’t run normal Windows apps. RT has failed to achieve significant momentum in the market, and I could see Elop and Nadella being very cautious about risking another RT-based product flop. More prudent to pull it now, ship the Intel-based jumbo Surface tablet, and do a minitablet later, if at all, based on Windows Phone. The jumbo product won’t change the world, but at least it won’t embarrass Microsoft.

If that was the call, it’s a prudent decision that totally misreads the market for mobile devices. RT was a bad choice for full-sized Surface tablets because they are too close in price and size to notebooks. No Windows user wants a notebook that won’t run Windows apps. But a minitablet could have been sold as an information appliance, for which full Windows app compatibility is much less important.

This situation illustrates why the tech industry has so much trouble creating truly new device categories. Small startups have trouble scraping together the money necessary to do a really different product. Doing it right often takes on the order of $20 million, more than you can easily raise from VCs or Kickstarter. Big companies have that sort of money, but they’re usually risk averse and would rather stick to established categories of product. Which is what Microsoft just did.

Ah well, the net impact is that Microsoft has now whiffed twice on the minitablet market, once with the twin-screen Courier product and now Surface mini. I wonder if they’ll get a third chance.

I’ll also be interested to see what the last-minute cancellation costs Microsoft. If they were close to launching, there will be parts and manufacturing contracts with big cancellation fees. Presumably Nadella will be doing some sort of restructuring of the company in the near future – new CEOs always do – and the writedown, if any, can be buried in that.

Meanwhile, someone at Microsoft is probably sitting on a roomful of Surface Mini prototypes that are headed to a shredder. I have one humble request: Could you please slip one of them to me?

The reports leaking out of Redmond are intriguing. Tomorrow (May 20, 2014) Microsoft will reportedly announce a “Surface Mini” tablet, a touchscreen device in the same size class as an iPad Mini but equipped with a stylus and note-taking software (link).

Most of the press reports have focused on the chip vendor (link) and comparisons to the iPad Mini, but what most of them seem to miss is that this may be a new category of mobile device. The Surface Mini as described in the reports sounds very much like an info pad, a tablet optimized for managing business information and taking notes in meetings.

That product opportunity has been evident for at least ten years. It has a very distinct customer base that is more interested in business productivity than in playing games or listening to music. When I was at Palm, we studied the market closely, and later I tried to pull together a startup to build one (that evolved into Zekira, the software startup I’m working on now).

Although you can use an iPad for business functions, a device optimized for notes and business productivity could be far more compelling than an iPad for that particular usage and for those particular customers. But the price has to be right and a ton of little features have to be done correctly. And you have to market it properly, so it looks like the ultimate replacement for the paper notepad rather than a debased iPad. The right product is an appliance for business info, not an iPad that happens to have a stylus.

I’ve written about the info pad opportunity in the past. You can read about it here.

Is this the vision Microsoft’s shooting for? Will it get the details right? I’m more intrigued by this announcement than by anything else Microsoft’s done in years. Stay tuned.

I was at a developer conference earlier this year, and the discussion came around to a certain very popular pattern-matching game. I was surprised by how much hostility I heard. “That thing,” one developer fumed, “is just a slot machine.”

At the time I chalked it up as jealousy. Sure, many mobile games have random elements, but the best ones also require a lot of thought. That’s nothing like a slot machine.

But as I learn more about mobile gaming, I start to see the developer’s point. Most people outside the game industry don’t realize that free-to-play games, by far the most successful mobile game category, are often supported financially by a very small number of users who pay extravagantly for power-ups, extra lives, and in-game currency. The whole point of many successful free-to-play games is to identify these “whales” and extract as much money as possible from them.

The discussion of this process at mobile conferences is sometimes uncomfortable. Non-paying players (the great majority of a game’s users) are often dismissed as meat to be fed to the whales. An intense amount of thought goes into not just identifying the whales, but determining their individual psychology and the best techniques to pull more money from that particular type of person. Players are tracked in as much detail as possible, including exactly which promotion they responded to, what their purchasing pattern is, and any other details the developer can glean from them. Every aspect of the game is crafted to maximize revenue extraction, including minute changes in graphics, button designs, and subtle changes in game play. Anything that creates even a small fraction of one percent change in a conversion rate can mean the difference between a successful and unsuccessful game, so the pressure to constantly refine everything is immense.

At its recent F8 developer conference, Facebook gave a great overview of this process. You can view it here.

At several recent conferences, I’ve heard developers say they’re starting to realize that there seems to be no upper limit on the amount of money you can extract from some users. Do you think offering a bundle of power-ups for $50 is outrageous? Create a bigger offer at $100 and you’ll make even more total revenue.

This process of systematically designing games to extract revenue, and targeting offers at the biggest whales, makes many game developers uncomfortable. In an excellent essay on Gamasutra, Mike Rose wrote, “Free-to-play games aren't after everyone for a few dollars -- they're after weak people in vulnerable states for hundreds, if not thousands.” (link)

Many game developers take issue with that statement. They point out that there’s nothing wrong with accepting money from people as long as they’re in control of their actions. Some people just plain like playing mobile games and are happy to spend money for a better gaming experience. What’s wrong with letting them pay? Besides, if a console gamer buys an Xbox for $300 and a bunch of games worth $700, we wouldn’t call the console industry exploitative. Why should mobile games be any different?

But the discussion at the conferences sometimes sounds a lot like gambling executives trying to talk their way around the problem of compulsive gambling. And sure enough, there are efforts to create an ethical code of conduct for free-to-play game developers, defining how far they can and cannot go to pull money out of a customer (link). You don’t usually get a code of ethics for an industry unless it has a potential ethics problem.

Meanwhile, what’s very clear is that successful free-to-play game development is much more about science than art. I think many game developers were drawn to the field for the art -- they want to create the most engrossing, glorious game experience they can; the game equivalent of a blockbuster movie. I think about the awesomeness that was Marathon and Myst on the Macintosh, or the surreal weirdness of Badland on iOS (link), and that’s the sort of pure mind-bending joy that I want from a mobile game. The idea of systematically altering that experience to extract another purchase from 0.5% of the users feels fundamentally wrong, and probably explains some of the developers’ complaints.

But rather than dismissing their complaints as frustrated idealism, I think it’s a good idea to listen and think about where the industry is going. I think the code of conduct is a very good idea; without it, we could easily end up with government regulation of free-to-play gaming, and I can’t imagine how that could be effective without destroying the category altogether. It would also be a very good idea to develop other new revenue streams to support mobile gaming. That’s why I’m always interested when someone like Facebook claims they can fix mobile advertising. You may not love the idea of mobile games becoming like commercial television, but I think we’d all be a lot more comfortable pushing an occasional ad at every user rather than trying to extract $1,000 from 0.5% of them.

Considering how big and successful Facebook is, it gets surprisingly little respect in Silicon Valley. Although everyone acknowledges the company’s size, it’s usually viewed either with hostility (among the small but intensely vocal group that cares deeply about privacy) or mild indifference (by everyone else). It’s not usually seen as a leader capable of changing markets, let alone driving the cutting edge of anything. The widespread dismay over Facebook’s purchase of 3D goggle maker Oculus VR was a great example of this attitude: the company’s not viewed as a good home for innovation.

So I was very interested when Facebook laid out a strategy for mobile last week that is not just adequate, but actually sounds quite smart, and could potentially make a big difference in the mobile industry. Of course the success of any strategy depends on how well it’s implemented; the history of the Valley is littered with cool-sounding strategies that failed or were never seriously tried (link). But if Facebook’s actions match its words I think it could change the competitive dynamic in the mobile industry, and in the process make life a lot better for independent app developers.

Facebook’s problem

The mobile tech world is dominated by proprietary platforms. Apple and Google both run controlled ecosystems in which they decide the key features and reserve the right to remove other companies from the field of play. Apple is a bit more controlling than Google, but they both manipulate their platforms to maximize their profits and prevent other companies from becoming too powerful.

This is nothing new in computing history. On personal computers, Windows and Macintosh are both proprietary platforms. In fact, one of the few recent examples of a huge open platform in tech is the web. No single entity controls the features of the web or who can play on it. This helped produce a host of big web companies, like Google and Facebook and Amazon, and a wide array of customer choice. The downside has been poorly coordinated user experiences, and platform innovation that moves at a glacial pace because it has to go through standards committees.

The proprietary mobile platforms have been great for users and developers in many ways. Apple and Google push each other to add new features and device categories, and the app stores on both platforms have led to an explosion of third party software. However, there’s a downside, especially for developers. They have to spend heavily to adapt their products to iOS and Android. Their apps are commoditized by the structure of the app stores. Apple and Google both take an excessive cut of the revenue the apps do get. And if an app category starts to become too popular, there’s a very good chance that Apple or Google will build it into the platform and crush the third parties.

As a result, the app economy in mobile is far smaller and weaker than the web economy on the desktop. To a big web company like Facebook, that’s very threatening. Facebook’s business on the web depends on it being the hub of your social interaction, which it analyzes to target advertising customized for your interests. On mobile, Google is working hard to build its own social features into Android, and the whole idea of a single social hub is threatened as social features are built into a wide range of mobile apps. Although Facebook’s latest apps on mobile have been far more successful than its first efforts, it’s still at risk of being walled off by the platform vendors on one side while it is nibbled to death by a hoard of developers on the other side.

So the question for Facebook is what its fundamental role will be in mobile. Can it find new ways to capture social information for use in ads? Can it create standards that give it a stable power base against the platform companies? And can it find a way to leverage the swarming strength of the little app companies?

The Facebook Platform

At the F8 developer conference last week, the company announced a series of new services and APIs for mobile developers that could give it a much deeper role in the mobile app ecosystem. The announcements included:

–The Audience Network, an ad network that’s supposed to let developers tap into Facebook’s mobile advertising revenue stream. App developers are hungry for revenue, so this could be very important if it works. I’ll come back to this below.

–An API called AppLinks that makes it easy for mobile apps to pass commands and data between each other, and to and from web servers. I’m still learning all the API can do, but I think it has the potential to let mobile apps work together in a variety of creative ways. As some others have pointed out, it also lets Facebook’s mobile apps integrate more seamlessly with other social sharing apps, potentially positioning Facebook as a hub for mobile social activity (link).

–A mobile Like button that developers can easily integrate into their apps. This will help developers publicize their apps, but it also gives Facebook data on what sort of apps you use. That can be mined to target advertising (are you seeing a pattern here?).

–Hosted developer services, under the brand name Parse, that help developers store data, compute, and process notifications in the cloud. Parse offered those services before, but the free tier has been expanded, in some cases by as much as 70x. It would be great for developers if Facebook set off a wave of price competition among back-end service companies.

–A promise of API stability, which would make developers more willing to invest in Facebook technologies.

–Expanded user controls over the information that is shared when someone uses Facebook Login. This may reduce the number one fear that users have of Facebook Login: fear that the app will post unwanted messages on your behalf.

–A big, no-obligations offer of free services for small developers, with free ad credits and other services from Facebook plus other services from several third party companies. (Full disclosure: one of those free offers is from UserTesting, where I am the mobile strategy guy.) If you’re a small developer I think you’d be foolish not to take advantage of it. To learn more, go here.

The overall message was developer love from Facebook. As Mark Zuckerberg put it, “my goal for our culture over the next ten years is to build a culture of loving the people we serve....We want to build a platform that's reliable for you.” (link)

Will it work?

Taken as a whole, the announcements are a coordinated effort to make mobile developers more successful, and at the same time give Facebook a much more central role in mobile computing. But that’s just a story at this point. I’ve seen many great tech strategies fail utterly in implementation. What matters is the details of how Facebook will pursue its plans, and how hard it will try to make them work. Here are four key issues to watch:

How well will the Audience Network work? Facebook claims that its mobile advertising is double the effectiveness of other mobile advertising. Basically, Facebook knows you better than anyone else, so it can target ads more precisely, making advertisers pay more money for them. The new Audience Network will let third party developers place those targeted ads in their own applications. So if a Facebook member uses an app that’s in the Audience Network, he or she will see Facebook-selected ads in that app. Developers can also customize the look of ads to match their applications, making the ads less jarring for their users.

In the desktop world, many websites and web apps succeeded because there was enough advertising money available to support software and content companies. That hasn’t generally been the case for mobile, because the payments per mobile ad are low and because overall spending on mobile advertising has been depressed. If Facebook can change that dynamic – a huge if – it might change the economics of mobile apps fundamentally.

I cannot overstate how important that would be for mobile developers. Today they struggle with commoditization in the app store, and freemium pricing policies that too often feel like bait-and-switch schemes. A stable, substantial advertising revenue base could change everything. But it depends on many unknowns: Can Facebook convince advertisers to pour more of their ad budgets into mobile? Will the targeting work? And most importantly, how much of that ad revenue will Facebook share with developers? Facebook wouldn’t answer that question at F8, so I can’t tell if the Audience Network is a potential breakthrough or a tease.

Will Facebook stay committed? Facebook’s execs said all the right things about supporting developers – we’ll maintain our APIs, help you grow your business, meet with you regularly, and so on. It’s everything a developer could wish for: a big powerful company that’s agnostic about OS and wants third party developers to thrive.

It all sounds great, but hearing Facebook talk about developer commitment is a bit like hearing a French president swear loyalty to his wife. Facebook embraced developers once before, when it encouraged them to build games and other apps on top of its desktop platform. The resulting surge in Facebook apps helped to crush MySpace. But once that battle was over, Facebook gradually lost interest in developers. The company didn’t even hold developer conferences in 2012 and 2013.

So it’s reasonable to ask: Is Facebook committed to the long term this time, or is this a tactical maneuver that’ll end as soon as Facebook is more established in mobile? I think in this case Facebook’s long-term interests are more closely aligned with developers. But does Facebook itself understand that?

Will Facebook become a predator in apps? Microsoft once had an incredibly vibrant third party app economy on Windows. But in its drive for revenue growth, the company eventually turned predator, trying to take over almost every major app category: graphics, antivirus, accounting, etc. That strangled application investment on Windows, and drove developers into the web. In many ways, you can trace the decline of Windows to the time when Microsoft turned against its own developers.

Here’s Mark Zuckerberg on his attitude toward developers, in a conversation with Wired:

“We’ve always believed that there were going be a lot of different ways to share content, and that we were never going to build all of them ourselves. We try to build the most important ones. But on top of that, you’re going to see dozens of other apps that developers build that each use the Facebook login, Facebook to share, the mobile “like” button, push notification from Parse, app installs through Facebook, and Facebook monetization tools in order to turn their apps into businesses.”

I would feel so much better if he’d said “hundreds of thousands” of developers instead of “dozens.” But maybe he doesn’t want to sound threatening to Apple. Which brings me to the fourth issue:

Can Facebook walk the tightrope with Apple? Google and Facebook are mortal enemies. The Facebook Audience Network reinforces that; both companies want to be the dominant ad supplier on mobile, and only one can win. But Facebook’s position relative to Apple is much more ambiguous. Today Apple is willing to cooperate with Facebook, allowing it to operate more or less freely on iOS, and partnering with it when appropriate. Mostly the two companies stay out of each-others’ way. With Facebook now advocating cross-platform APIs and positioning itself as a powerful hub for mobile advertising, will Apple continue to take a benign view of the company, or will it start to systematically restrain Facebook on iOS? If that happens, it’ll be much harder for Facebook to establish standards. To use a military analogy, Facebook really shouldn’t get itself into a two-front war. It needs Apple as an ally, or at least a neutral.

I think there’s a good case for Facebook and Apple to work together against Google, but that would require both companies to restrain their egos. That’s not easy to do in Silicon Valley. Mark Zuckerberg’s next big test may be his diplomatic skills.

The bottom line: Will Facebook be a facilitator or a predator in mobile?

What is Facebook’s vision for its long-term role in mobile? Does it want to be like Amazon Web Services, facilitating a robust ecosystem with lots of apps, and taking a small revenue cut from many of them; or does it favor the Windows model, in which it treats developers like a field of vegetables, to be harvested as soon as they start to ripen? We can’t tell today, and Facebook itself may not know yet. So it’s too early to judge what Facebook’s new strategy will mean for the industry. But I think one thing is clear: what Facebook’s doing in mobile is important, and it could change the rules. The company can’t be ignored.

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I'm cofounder of Zekira, an app that helps you recall context around any bit of info in your life: a name, meeting, file, etc. You can learn more here. In ten years at Apple, my roles included Director of Worldwide Customer & Competitive Analysis and director of Mac Platform Marketing. At Palm I was Chief Competitive Officer and VP of Product Planning. For more info on me, visit my website. Note: The things I write here are my own opinions and do not represent the views of my employer(s).